Week 20 – Whether the weather be fine

The sun has got his hat on, this week. Last year, I bought a freestanding aircon unit thing. Not a proper one, with a hose, but the kind you can put cold water in and it blows cold air out. I am pleased I did this, because without it this last few days would have been more hell.

My project for the last couple of years is now up in public, and I’m sure I’ll get around to doing more about Skute later on, like constructing the back-end and generic tech assumptions. It’s a content sharing platform based around physical location. So, for a slightly corporate example, there’s a new bit of Mountain Dew sponsored street-art up in Shoreditch that’s got a closed Skute on it. If you scan the Skute tag next to it (it’s NFC, so this is Android only for now) you can see some video of them putting it up, and info about the artists. If you’ve got the app, you can subscribe to updates about it or them, otherwise you get a read-only web view. A slightly more open example would be a skute stuck to a common skater hangout, with an open skute that anyone with the app can add videos of them doing tricks to. (More likely, I see friends-list locked skutes for that case. Getting big enough to have to worry about spam on them is one of those “good problem” rakes in the grass of the future). There’s still a lot to do – there are a few core features I wish we’d had time to polish off before going public – but it’s good to see it out in the open.

I’m kind of hoping that with Skute out in the open and the Gadgets post out of my queue I can get back to content updates here. There’s a new audio update coming tomorrow – a reading of a recent Faction Fiction piece – and then I hope to get stuck into a new Secret Lore episode. Also coming up is my first adventures in brewing, which has been interesting.

Gameplaywise I’ve recently got into Marvel Heroes, which is basically a FtP Diablo clone with added licencing, and had a lot of fun playing Hawkeye in it. I got tempted in to SWTOR again via their XP boost system, which means I can run the (interesting) class storylines without needing to care about the planet storylines I’ve done a dozen times already. I’ve just closed Chapter 1 of the Imperial Agent, and I’m hoping to get though that and two others before my sub renews. Secret World’s got its anniversary content on, though, so that’s going to be a distraction.

I’ve also ended up running an ARK: Survival Evolved server for friends. ARK’s a survival/build/minecraft/thing with added dinosaurs. It’s fun and interesting, and at some point I’ll play it as well as running the server 🙂

And LARP. Odyssey went well, both on a personal level and a game-running level. For the first time – I’ve been crewing it since event 2 – I got out on the field as a character, and into the NPC meeting rooms as two different gods. Playing an all-powerful literal god in LARP is the crackiest of all crack, and I need to do it more often. Not everything was perfect, and there are aspects of the game we need to address (we screwed up blessings quite a bit), but the game was an emotional high… which meant the resulting fall came with a bump. My last couple of games crewing Empire, at least for a while, are coming up and preparations for next year’s odyssey (ahem) into playing are well underway. Kit is being acquired, and I’ve just received the notification that the group I applied to join has accepted me. Commonly, larp groups have a “black-ball” joining system so you don’t end up having to roleplay with someone you have an out-of-character abhorrence to. It’s the first time I’ve had to go though that kind of system, though, and it’s faintly nerve-racking. However, success. And now I have to build and name a character..